There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
– Dave Barry
(Vintage photo of a squadron of Supermarine Spitfires in echelon formation. Photo RAF)
I had more time than usual on my hands this bright Sunday morning. The drunks came back rom the bar about 0400, filled with merriment and the joy of high-octane alcohol and youth. It being spring, and at the junction of the cut-over from central heating to cooling at Big Pink, the windows were open with a satisfying cool breeze to waft over the thick eiderdown.
Geezerhood comes with obligations, I now realize, and they do not call them grumpy old men for nothing. I was tempted to start yelling at the revelers, and thought better of it. I wished I was fully ambulatory and filled with exuberance and a careless confidence that the world was new and endless. So, I made the coffee and sat down to sort the morning traffic.
It is a slow news day. Five more members of the Presidential entourage were sent home from Colombia on grounds of alleged sexual misconduct having nothing to do with the President and everything to do with commercial sex at the hotel where the Secret Service detail was billeted. These were military members of the advance detail, apparently, and I suspect flight crew or communicators. The Associated Press was on the case, and interviewed waiters at the hotel, who described the agents as drinking heavily during the down-town before Mr. Obama arrived. The President travels with a small army, as you know, and this is a hazard of the trade.
He reportedly was miffed that the old bad blood with Cuba- something that dates to before the Commander-in-Chief was born- brought ancient grievances about Yanqui gun-boat diplomacy out in the open. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.
And that is the difference between the public narrative and what we would like to believe. I remember one of the most attractive stories from the days when I would have been one of the drunken young men far below my window. You might remember it from junior high school:
“Cheap Army Surplus Jeeps! You can buy a brand new jeep in a crate for $50!”
Ads with headlines like this ran for decades in the back of Boy’s Life, Popular Mechanics, and several other magazines I used to read as a kid in the 1960’s (and those ads probably ran in the 1940’s and 1950’s as well). The ads promised to tell you how to buy Willys MB and Ford GPW jeeps and other government surplus for extremely low prices. They charged a fee for sending you this information. You mailed in your payment and waited for the postman to deliver the pamphlet that would divulge the secrets of buying tools, equipment, jeeps, trucks, etc. etc. on the cheap for “your fun and profit.”
It was complete nonsense, of course. No such crated vehicles actually existed, but in the long aftermath of the Biggest Conflict in Human History, there were a lot of strange things laying around. In fact, I have heard that the Korean War forced the Navy to dispatch plain-clothed agent to the Surplus stores to quietly buy back electronic gear that had been auctioned off in the great demobilization. And I remember well the consortiums that formed between third and fourth period to assemble the cash involved to get the crated vehicles and have our own mechanized battalion to take to High School.
Oh well. Scheming to get the non-existent jeeps had an element of pleasant madness about it, and some people have never got over it.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain has been assailed recently for some international travel. Like Mr. Obama, some commentators have opined that his recent trip to Burma (aka Myanmar) verged on state-sponsored tourism. I saw the pictures of him bare-foot at the vast golden temple complex of the Shwedagon in Rangoon, and sighed. He had gone out to the old Imperial colony to meet with Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, recently released from house arrest and elected to parliament.
(Socotra and Burmese dissident Mimi Miyant Huu at the Shwedagon Pagoda, 1995. Photo Socotra)
It is a matter close to my heart. The last time I stood barefoot in the Shwedagon we were attempting to get The Lady sprung from arrest, and had an immensely good time as part of Congressman Bill’s entourage. As part of a comprehensive effort to secure her release, we met with members of the brutal SLORC junta and opposition figures. For the latter, it was wise to be in adjacent Thailand, and we traveled across the border to the old RAF airbase at Mae Sot to tour a Karin Refugee site.
There is a lot of crap laying around from the late conflict in SE Asia. There are hulks of C-47 Skytrains along the runways, and more. There is a persistent rumor that Spitfires might be buried in Australia’s remote Queensland, possibly under a derelict drive-in theater in the town of Oakey. My guess is that they have more in common with the jeeps in a box than anything else, but the hunt for Spitfires is what brought Prime Minister Cameron to a place where he could see the boundary between hobby and mental illness in Burma.
One of the PM’s constituents is a farmer named David Cundall. When not hunting for warbirds, he operates a farm at Sandtoft, near Scunthorpe. He got his version of jeeps-in-a-crate through and American who heard a story about some other guy’s story about the dumbest thing he had ever heard of, which was that several aircraft had been buried in the C-B-I theater. Maybe as many as twenty Supermarine Spitfires.
According to the story, the aircraft had been shipped out from Britain in the last days of World War II. No less a figure than Lord Louis Mountbatten decided that the complex situation on the ground was so fluid that the crated iconic fighters should be buried at their aerial port of arrival. Crated and swaddled in packing, wrapped and dolloped with cosmolene reservative, just like the Jeeps.
Virtually brand new. No, not virtually. Brand new and never out of the box.
As a demonstration of his commitment to the hobby of aviation archeology. Mr.
Cundall spent more than $200,000 of his own money and more than a decade of his life to visit Burma a dozen times, court the notoriously reticent dictatorship, hire ground penetrating radar devices and engage increasingly elderly local guides to search for the buried birds.
I would offer that this obsession passes any line between hobby and madness, but it looks like it has worked, and he found them.
Considering that the Spitfire might be the prettiest pistol-engine aircraft of all time, and is the icon of the desperate fight of The Few against the bomber streams of the Luftwaffe, an existing flyable Spit might be worth two or three million dollars. Less than 35 of the aircraft exist in this world today. A discovery of twenty is something of almost incalculable value.
The people who engage in this sort of hide-and-seek of aviation history are mad, absolutely. A P-38 Lighting is on the air-show circuit these days. The P-38 might be one of the prettiest warbirds ever to fly: twin-boomed and twin-engined, the Lightning was the airplane that Chester Nimitz chose to intercept Admiral Yamamoto’s plane and shoot it down.
The only flying example remaining is “Glacier Gal,” since some loons found evidence that a whole squadron of the fork-tailed long-range fighters had run low on fuel and crash-landed on a Greenland ice sheet in 1942. The aircraft were there, sure enough, but buried beneath 250-feet of accumulated ice and snow.
This is what Glacier Gal looked like when they tunneled down to find her:
Other lunatics did their homework and discovered that a post-war reconnaissance mission flown by the B-29 Superfortress Kee Bird had ended in an emergency landing on the Greenland ice. The bomber has rested there undisturbed until 1994, when a privately-funded mission was launched to repair and return it. The attempted recovery resulted in the destruction and loss of the airframe by fire on the ground. The maintenance crew chief died of a blood clot in the process of the attempted restoration, and an aircrewman was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation in the fire.
(Kee Bird on Fire.)
In the end, recovery of the Spitfires of Burma will have to pass through some interesting political wickets. International sanctions forbid the movement of military materials in and out of Burma, and it was also feared the Burmese government would not allow any foreign excavations on their territory. Hence the need for the PM’s intervention.
The time may be just right. The new, reformist posture of the Burmese government, coupled with the election of The Lady, and the personal request of the Prime Minister means it is likely that some sanctions will be lifted after an EU review begins on April 23.
With the help of David Cameron, and his state-sponsored tourism, hopes are surging that Burmese President Thein Sein of Burma will grant permission for the dig.
People do extraordinary things to get close to the old war-birds. There will be more to come on this story of madness in a very strange land, and you better believe that I will be following with interest. Hell, I might even want to go back and look for myself. Maybe there are some Flying Tiger P-40s in the jungle.
It is one of my hobbies, after all.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com